


Baggage Handling

by Windian



Category: Tales of Graces
Genre: Gen, Lambda & Sophie friendship, Post-Game, also a follow-up to the fodra vs humans stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-22
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-16 15:20:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7273408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Windian/pseuds/Windian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Does that mean you'll be alone, all that time?" </p><p>"I no longer consider myself alone in this world. Not with a friend who can live forever." </p><p>2,000 years after its destruction, Sophie and Lambda return to Fodra.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Baggage Handling

One thousand years have passed, and yet Sophie still wears the same perfume. Lambda remembers the day they'd gifted it to her, back when he and Asbel inhabited the same body. _You're all grown up now, Sophie,_ Asbel had told her, _so I bought you a more grown up present._

Sopheria scented, with a touch of jasmine and sweet pea. Asbel had been ridiculously nervous. _It'll be fine, she'll love it,_ he'd told him, and in the end she'd beamed and said she'd wear it every day.

Lambda chuckles under his breath. Sophie turns to him from her seat, face shaded under the brim of a large white floppy hat. "What is it?" she asks.

"Nothing," he says.

"Fine. Don't tell me," she huffs, tapping her nails against the polystyrene coffee cup wedged between her thighs as they wait for the shuttle launch.

He doesn't tell her the joke because she doesn't care for his ironic (dark, she'd call it) sense of humour. That civilisations have risen and fallen, everyone they ever knew is dead, and Sophie still wears the same sopheria perfume Asbel had dithered for weeks to give her.

 _Maybe he wasn't such a fool after all,_ Lambda thinks, with a fondness he'd never admit to.

The steward strides down the aisle between the seats on the shuttle, asking customers to "kindly fasten your seatbelts, as we are now preparing for launch." On the aquascreen projected up front, a woman demonstrates folding away a tray table. Lambda fusses with it, until Sophie grins beneath the shade of her hat and leans over him, presses a button and cleanly folds it away in three seconds.

After a moment, Lambda says, "I'd almost got it."

"Sure," says Sophie, turning away so he can't see her laughing at him.

Lambda crosses his arms, jiggling his leg as the steward makes another sweep of the aisle. "-You may feel your ears pop as we pass though the aquasphere. Please do not be alarmed, as this is only-"

"Lambda. You need to put on your seatbelt," Sophie says.

"I'll be fine."

"I know you will. But they won't take off until you put it on. They're got stricter on safety in the past fifty years."

Ridiculous. Pascal had made this body for him, thereby, it was nearly indestructible. But all the same Sophie continues to glare at him, and he buckles his seatbelt rather than listening to her complaints. If he's learnt anything in this millenia, it's that this entire damn world is ridiculous, and to take it in his stride.

In the row in front of them are a group of excited schoolgirls in pleated skirts and blazors with the Izolle Tech emblem. As the engines prep, their teacher holds a pop quiz. _Can anyone tell me where the heat ray cannons are located? Yes, wonderful Carri. Now does anyone know what the membrane that surrounds our planet is called?_

Lambda half listens to their chatter, distracted. Something has been bothering him about Sophie since they met at the docking bay, and she'd picked a noodle from his shirt and told him he'd spilled ramen down himself.

She wears a white sundress and sandals, a light bolero on her shoulders. The schoolteacher exclaims, _Yes, Sara, that's correct!_ And it clicks.

"Your hair," Lambda says, letting a few strands fall between his fingers. "You're growing it out. How come?"

She shrugs. "It just felt right."

He doesn't say: you've not worn your hair long in one thousand years.

After Asbel died, she cut it short. She'd worn it in a bob during the era his son Eric ruled Lhant, and worn it short as a boy during the troubled years of the second Strahtan revolution. Grew it out to her chin during the messy unification years, and lopped it off again during the conflict with Fendel. He's seen her with a multitude of styles over the years, but never past her shoulders.

It feels like an omen. But of what, Lambda is still uncertain.

* * *

At immigration control, a portly officer behind his desk reels off a list of banned substances and various animals they're forbidden from bringing into Fodra, just in case either of them have brought pocketfuls of frogs.

"Ecosystem's still real delicate," he tells them, munching on a handful of sunflower seeds.

"Of course. We must protect it," Sophie says, with such sincerity the officer peels his eyes from the list he's been rattling off to take an actual look at her.

"You visiting for long Miss..." his eyes go to his files, "Heis? What is that, Strahtan?"

"Just a few days. And something like that."

His eyes shift to Lambda, pausing briefly at his white hair. "We've had a lot of couples visiting lately. Pretty romantic I guess, a trip to another world."

From beside him he can see Sophie stifling laughter under her hand. "We're just friends. Known each other for a long time." She shoots him a knowing glance, and Lambda replies with a smirk. "Unfortunately," she finishes with.

Lambda snorts.

He can feel the immigration officer's eyes on him and Sophie's, as though he's trying to puzzle out the relationship between them.

 _Good luck with that,_ he thinks.

Evidently, whatever he makes of their friendship, he deems their pockets free from frogs, stamps their passports and waves them on. "You two have a good time on Fodra," he tells them.

At baggage collection, he waits with Sophie- _Miss Heis_ , he thinks- for the conveyor to bring their suitcases, and Lambda comments, "It's been centuries since you used that name."

"I guess so."

"And you're growing out your hair," he continues.

Sophie says nothing, and they collect their bags in silence. Before they head to the hotel, they buy over-priced coffee and sit in the cafe over looking the shuttle bay. Lambda drinks too fast, and when they wheel their cases to catch the airbus, he can still feel it stinging on his tongue.

* * *

These days, it's easier to breathe on Fodra. As he and Sophie ascend the sharp incline up the cliffside, his breath doesn't catch in his throat. Grass crunches crisply underfoot and a wicker picnic basket swings off Sophie's arm.

(He's tempted to ask her, is that Protos Heis, now? He wisely shuts up).

From her basket, Sophie even produces a chequered blanket, whisking it out like a conjurer to spread it across the grass at the cliffside's edge. She pats the space beside her, and she sets a slightly warm can of lemonade in his hand.

Looking out over the valley, Lambda can see two contrasting images in his head. Fodra, now over two millenia ago, dying. He'd been a good scapegoat back then, an easy target to blame for the humans' problems when they themselves had sucked the eleth from the earth and all the goodness from the ground. Turned the soil sour with their wars and with their weapons.

Two thousand years later and Fodra seems a different planet. From the cliffside, they watch the farmers in the fields, polyethylene sheets covering the soil reflecting light like water.

Lambda closes his eyes against these conflicting images. "Will you finally tell me why you invited me out here, Sophie? Unless you're really telling me we came all the way to Fodra for a picnic?"

"How rude. How do you know I didn't?"

 _Maybe eight hundred years ago. Not now,_ Lambda thinks. "Sophie," he says, pointed.

She drags her fingers through her hair, long enough now to reach half way down her back. A nervous gesture. "I was wondering. About how Fodra is feeling," she says.

He looks out at the scenery, and Fodra looks with him. He feels her uncertainty as keenly as he does his own.

"She remembers," is all he says.

Fodra had forgiven, yet she did not forget.

"She's giving humans another chance?" Sophie asks.

"For now."

He himself knows too well the duality of human nature. On one side, compassion. On the other, cruelty. On one side, peace. On the other, war. Fodra's fate all depended on how the coin landed.

"I believe in them," says Sophie. Lambda makes a noise.

Even after all this time, her faith in humans remains unwavering. Even as she's watched their conflicts and wars, their cruelty. He admits, "I'm envious you can still be so effortlessly trusting."

"It's not without effort," she says, hands closed around the soda can. "When I struggle, I think about Asbel. About how he did the right thing, all the way to the end. When I think about him, and all our other friends, it gives me strength to keep believing." A small smile lingers on her lips. It's fond, nostalgic, like an adult drifting back to happy childhood memories.

Some days, she can shoot the breeze for hours: about Cheria and her relief group, and how it grew into an organization boasting thousands of members, helping countless in need. About Hubert, who'd helped to quell the Strahtan revolution that stole so many lives. Pascal and Malik, who'd transformed Fendel. Richard, who even now still has a statue standing in Barona Square, testament to Windor's last king and first elected prime minister.

Even if she always complains it looks nothing like him.

"I recently read a study by a professor in Sable Izolle," Lambda says. "About how human beings were doomed when they turned from being hunter-gatherers to agriculture. As soon as that development occurred, the human population exploded. Human beings in such vast numbers could no longer survive like other animals, co-existing with nature. They had no choice but to take from nature, to exploit it."

His eyes move to the polyethylene sheets, stirring in the fields like waves on the ocean. As he speaks, Sophie opens the picnic basket and unwraps the cellophane on the sandwiches. "Tuna or egg and mayo?" she asks.

"The man argued in his study that human beings have become a parasitic race. Destined to destroy themselves, or their habitat. Or both. Tuna, please."

He bites into the doughy white bread. The day is growing hot, and he presses the lemonade can to his neck. It's disappointingly warm and provides little relief.

"So," Sophie asks, "did you agree?"

Fodra's will stirs within him. Lambda fusses with the ring pull of the soda can, without opening it. "I don't know," he admits.

"Whether or not it was a mistake, I can't help but admire humans' ingenuity. I could never have imagined they would create any of the marvels of the modern world that they've made."

Lambda had. He'd seen it all before. Saw what they led to.

"Yet," he says, "you destroyed Pascal's android research."

Sophie falls quiet. "I didn't realise you knew about that." She links her fingers together. "I admit it. I'm nervous, too. Things have moved so quickly the past few years."

When they'd come to Ephinea, the Amarcians had sworn a pact to secrecy. Yet the overseer had broken her pact and opened the enclave to help Fendel, in effect opening the proverbial pandora's box. In a few short centuries, life on Ephinea had been revolutionised.

"For this world's sake, there should never be another me," Sophie says. Thinking of the rogue androids that had torn apart Fodra, Lambda is inclined to agree.

Yet even without the research, he can't help but wonder how much longer humanity will need to develop the technology once again, on their own. Or to create some other weapon, equally as destructive.

He sets down his unopened lemonade. He sighs. "Sophie, we're friends. Just ask me already."

She hesitates. "Ask what?"

"I know there's something on your mind. You haven't even opened the crablettes." The fact that they still sit in the basket in the tupperware box is nothing short of a miracle.

She opens her mouth to protest, and closes it. Her smile says, _you got me there._

Her hands close over fistfuls of her sundress. She asks, "If things go bad again... will you fight?"

"I'll have no choice," says Lambda. Fodra is a part of him- he must protect it, even from humans. "And you, Protos Heis?" At last he understands: the old name, the long hair. "Will you stand as humanity's champion once more?"

All this time, she's been preparing for battle.

"I'll have no choice," Sophie says.

An impasse. Lambda keeps Sophie's gaze, feels the stickiness growing at his back. The sun sits at the very centre of the sky.

At last Lambda says, "What kind of picnic even is this? You didn't even bring any cake."

Sophie's eyes narrow. She thrusts the can of drink at him. "Drink your damn lemonade, Lambda."

Much later, when the sun's setting, a sunset as yellow and crisp as a russet apple, Sophie lays her head on Lambda's shoulder. She smells like sopherias, like jasmine and sweet pea.

It may be inevitable. One day he will battle Protos Heis for the fate of this world once more. Yet, he hopes she can be Sophie for just a little while longer.


End file.
